“History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple…… truths, but history remembers them.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

I think those days have come and gone. We now have a ton of workplace regulations that are law whether unions are there or not. How are they relevant today? To keep adding on benefits that drive corporations elsewhere? Private unions had their heyday and took on those greedy owners. Public unions go head to head against… taxpayers?! FDR was right.

The world may be watching, but they’re not getting the whole story. Not when a 3,000-person bagger rally is somehow portrayed as equivalent to 60,000 anti-baggers.

And the media is also falling down on the job by calling this is a “budget battle”. If that were true, Walker would have accepted the union’s concessions and the budget is fine for fiscal 2011. He did not.

This is a worker’s rights and inequality issue. Anyone who portrays it as something else IS WRONG. And a lot of national media is wrong right now.

Agreed. One would think after six days of protest the media would be saying this is about worker’s rights instead of contributions to retirement and health insurance. But they don’t. They continue to treat worker’s rights as “oh by the way, Gov. Walker is also eliminating collective bargaining for state employees.” As if there was no value in that. They are wrong.

forgot…I’ll try once again to explain. This IS about worker rights but since the TEA Party is against worker rights this is by DEFAULT against the TEA Party. Now…if the TEA Party came out today and said we changed our minds and support worker rights there still would be a rally but the “default” issue would no longer exist.

For folks commenting about the nuze coverage, remember, the nuzemodels that are portrayed as “journalists” really don’t know jack s_it about issues. Teaching at a university a couple of years ago, one of the students in my course said, in response to my inquiry about what their major area or study was, that she was in biology but it was too difficult so she went into journalism.

Hi, Colleagues: just wanted to let you know that us union folks in NYC are holding a second support rally on Tuesday at 5 pm in front of FOX News on 6th Avenue.

Also, just another point–while I understand why folks are saying that they’d be willing to give monetary concessions if collective bargaining is preserved, we’ve let the debate slide away from the central point: there is no debt or deficit “crisis”, in any state or at the federal level, if we demanded that the rich pay their fair share. See It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: the Scam of the Deficit Crisis

Yeah Jonathan you are right. The top 5% pay half the taxes now. Their fair share should really be all of it. That way we could all vote ourselves benefits paid for by someone else! Great idea, but try it out in New York first. Oh wait, you already did:

Actually, the NFL Players Association is a good example of the need for unions. Their collective bargaining isn’t just about getting more money for millionaires. It is also about safer working conditions. They are concerned about the treatment of players with concussions. One of the biggest bones of contention in the upcoming contract fight is the owners’ desire to expand the season to 18 games. As Mike McCarthy (not a member of the union) pointed out, the Packers just barely made it through a 16-game regular season. The team was decimated by injuries.

Scott Walker doesn’t think that public employee unions should be able to bargain for safer working conditions. Nurses need to have adequate sleep between shifts for their own well being and that of their patients. It is the union that pressures employers to create schedules that allow time for sleeping between shifts.

Wow that’s a bit of a stretch Jill. The NFL has been very concerned about concussions and injuries, and I don’t think they were pressured into caring about it due to the players union. Why wouldn’t you think the league would care about them because they have a vested interest in the players (aka their cash cows).

forgot…you sound like a very jealous person. You must not be very happy in your own life that you have to come on here and celebrate the idea of the working middle class having their livelihoods taken away from them. That’s just very creepy and pathetic. Really.

Tell me…exactly what would you get out of having the unions busted? What’s in it for you *personally*? Do you think you’ll see a huge tax break or something? Well…don’t hold your breath…because Walker already spent the money he said he is going to collect from the “budget repair bill”…

Anon, where in comments have I celebrated anything regarding this? I believe public unions have over the years gotten such out-of-line lavish benefits that now it is hard to get people off of them. That’s why I am overall against dependenency on government. A lot of these employees have probably over-extended themselves, just like people in the private sector (that must be the case if people are going to lose their homes over a modest increase in pension and health contributions).

So yes it is unfortunate, but necessary. Eventually the well runs dry. Conservatives have been saying that for years. Now that day has come. But I’m not any more happy about it than you are. There’s nothing personal in it for me, nor do I want anything. We can’t pay higher taxes and we can’t afford to keep up this pace with government spending. Something’s gotta give.

Eventually the well runs dry. Conservatives have been saying that for years. Now that day has come.
Conservatives have been saying it for years. Republicans have been too – unfortunately almost all of them were pretending to be conservatives and when it came time to actually do what they said, they simply forgot about it.

If Walker actually keeps his word and addresses the fiscal problems, he might be the first.

There’s no well here and we’re not talking about water. We have corporate tax dodgers, a trillion dollar war, and annual so called “defense” expenditures of a half a trillion dollars. No amount of faux avuncularity can wish these facts away.

forgot, the NFL only cares about the long-term effects of brain injury on its players because of the plight of former players like Mike Webster, whose own brain injuries became very public and shamed the NFL into actually giving a crap about former players.

Health care benefits are done through the NFLPA, not the NFL. Increasing/improving coverage on policies is not something they had any legal standing to do.

The NFL could’ve & should’ve done more. They could have set up a fund of their own to help. Not doing so was either a bad decision or a tremendous act of kindness to the union. Had they stepped up and done what their own union wouldn’t, the NFLPA would have been all but neutered in public opinion and they could’ve gotten their $1 Billion or more pretty easily.

Except that the former union head was more against helping retired players than anyone. When guys like Jerry Kramer, Mike Ditka and Gayle Sayers have had to organize a fund to help take care of former players whose union health care is woefully inadequate to provide the coverage for the problems they’re facing, and Upshaw was asked about it, his response:

“The bottom line is I don’t work for them. They don’t hire me and they can’t fire me. They can complain about me all day long. They can have their opinion. But the active players have the vote.”Source

Though I guess, that was actually being nice. To a fellow Hall of Famer, Joe DeLamielleure, who was kept pestering him about helping out the hurting former players, he said:

“A guy like DeLamielleure says the things he said about me; you think I’m going to invite him to dinner? No. I’m going to break his damn neck.”Source

More good stuff:
“Why does the most lucrative professional sports league in the world have the worst pension and disability plan?” DeLamielleure asks. “My answer is: Gene Upshaw. He’s the one running this thing.”

“The NFL needs to address this so guys don’t have to be living in the (bleeping) homeless shelter.”– Former Packers guard Jerry Kramer, whose pension is $358 per month, on efforts to increase pensions for retired football players.

Thank God somebody else is in charge of the NFLPA. But seems to me, using the NFLPA as your example doesn’t quite prove the point you think it does.

Locke this is exactly why I say Unions are democracy in the workplace. Democracy and the unions are only as good as the people running them! Bad leadership does not mean the system is bad it means the people running them are.

if the NFLPA had as much power as the state government unions, and the NFL operated in a similar way, McCarthy wouldn’t be able to bench players who weren’t performing without a mile long paper trail. And he’d have to play the veteran players before the rookies regardless of ability or performance. On the plus side, we only have to pay Aaron Rodgers as much as Ryan Fitzpatrick or Dan Orlovsky since they all have 6 years experience.

The Packers, the firefighers, the Egyptians, the cops, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, The NAACP, FAIR Wisconsin, The NFLPA; amongst a whole slew of other organizations opposed to the substance of Walkers bill, or his hamfisted approach, or both, and now, that incorrigibly Marxist pack of raving red menacers………….. The Greater Madison Area Chamber of Commerce.